Dr. Sour Puss

To say that Anne Fadiman's book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was hugely influential on my life would be an understatement. It's pretty cliche for a doctor to say this about her book (akin to someone saying To Kill a Mockingbird is their favorite book, simply because they haven't read much since high school). I admit that I am not a particularly well read person, mostly because a busy life in medicine doesn't afford much down time for reading. However, for many of us in health care, the revelations in the book are profound and true. Before my life as a doctor, I started out as an activist for homeless people. When deciding a career path, I realized the most important contribution I could make to help disenfranchised people at the margins of society was to become their physician. Before I was interested in anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry, I was interested in the stories people had to tell. How they got where they were, what their lives were like, an